Finn Bowring

Misreading Gorz

Andr Gorzs work has been described as pop sociology, journalistic impressionism, and sociological punditry. He has been accused of both bourgeois individualism and backward-looking romanticism. Depending on the critic, Gorz is an erstwhile quasi-Stalinist or a reformed anti-Stalinist, an advocate of postmodern politics or simply an intellectual charlatan. My intention here is to demonstrate that Gorz is widely misrepresented and significantly misunderstood. The poor reception of his ideas in Britain stands in stark contrast to the popularity of Gorzs work on the Continent, where in many countries the issue of reduced working hours is firmly on the political agenda as a means for tackling unemployment. A dissident intellectual who has rarely allied himself with any academic school or political wing, Gorz is talked about far more than he is actually read. Too reformist for orthodox Marxists and too radical for the liberal Left, his independence from established doctrines has won him more critics than friends.
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I have not attempted an exegesis of Gorzs work, and assume the reader is familiar with Gorzs best-known book, Farewell to the Working Class, and aware that Gorz advocates a redistribution of work and a staged reduction in working time. To briefly summarize, Gorzs socialism is a dual society, divided between a sphere of heteronomy and a sphere of autonomy, with the former subordinated to the latter. Heteronomy implies functional rationality, the functional regulation of conduct and the functional integration of individuals. Hetero-regulated integrationwhat Habermas refers to as a non-normative regulation of individual decisions that extends beyond the actors consciousnesses1enables people to accomplish things that, as individuals, they can neither will nor often understand. It co-ordinates their behaviour by referring beyond their subjective preferences, norms and motivations to the imperatives of a pre-established organization. Autonomy, on the other hand, implies the social integration of individuals. Socially-integrated conduct is self-regulated by individuals who co-ordinate the attainment of common goals by consensus. The distinction between heteronomy and autonomy corresponds to Habermass theory of the uncoupling of systemcomprising economic and administrative subsystemsand lifeworld. Heteronomy and Freedom The most common misrepresentation of Gorz depicts his notion of heteronomous work as a sphere of total alienation that is inescapably dehumanizing and oppressive, precluding all possibility of enjoyment, interest, collaboration or initiative. For example, Berger and Kostede write that, The image of the factory as a hell of self-alienation with no hope for change is part of Gorzs depiction of a dual society. 2 Sayers offers a similar picture, stating that, in Farewell to the Working Class and Paths to Paradise, employment was portrayed as an entirely negative phenomenon. In modern industrial conditions, it cannot be a satisfying or self-realizing activity: it cannot be humanized, it is necessarily and ineliminably alienating.3 The apparent depth of this alienation has provoked an ardent response. Gorzs critics reply that his dual society cannot be stabilized unless elements of autonomy and free activity are introduced into the realm of necessity,4 that capitalist control of the labour process conflicts with limited but necessary worker autonomy in production,5 that subjectivity in production cannot be altogether eliminated and that, It is on this that labour can ground its liberation strategies.6 In Byrnes view Gorz denies subjective autonomy and innovative capacity to the working class, and he ignores the nature and effects of struggles in reproduction and the contribution these have made to the contemporary crisis.7 Whitbread concurs: Gorzs view is that modern
Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 2, Cambridge 1987, p. 117. Berger and Norbert Kostede, Review of Farewell to the Working Class, Telos, no 51, Spring 1982, p. 231. 3 Sean Sayers, Gorz on Work and Liberation, Radical Philosophy, no. 58, Summer 1991, p. 16. 4 Berger and Kostede, Review of Farewell, p. 232. 5 Geoff Hodgson, The Democratic Economy, Harmondsworth 1984, p. 190. 6 Berger and Kostede, Review of Farewell, p. 231. 7 David Byrne, A Rejection of Andr Gorzs Farewell to the Working Class, Capital and Class, no. 24, Winter 1985, pp. 77, 82.
2 Johannes 1 Jrgen

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industry cannot be organized democratically. For him, the logic of its technology requires top-down co-ordination and discipline as a condition for efficiency.8 What is most remarkable is that this interpretation can only be maintained by disregarding the preface to Farewell to the Working Class. This statement of intent explicitly contradicts the vulgar readings offered by Gorzs critics:
It is certainly possible to self-manage workshops or to self-determine working conditions or to co-determine the design of machines and the definition of tasks. Yet as a whole these remain no less determined in a heteronomous way by the social process of production or, in other words, by society insofar as it is itself a giant machine. Workers control (erroneously equated with workers self-management) amounts in reality to self-determining the modalities of what has already been heteronomously determined: the workers will share and define tasks within the framework of an already existing social division of labour.9

Gorz is not arguing that pleasure, interest, discretion and co-operation are incompatible with heteronomous work: Heteronomy does not mean that the workplace has to be a hell or a purgatory.10 What he is rejecting is the ambition to reconcile the differentiation of life and work, culture and technique, social integration and functional integration which capitalist modernity has engendered. Technical specialization and a spatial division of labour, often spanning different continents, means that, even if workers were able to abolish the technical and social (hierarchical) division of labour in the enterprise, the self-management of productive units could not be extended to incorporate control over the final product. This is because its design is ultimately determined by the specifications of other industrial sectors in the production chain, and more remotely by the heterogeneous demands of anonymous consumers. In this context, it is impossible for the social organization of production to be understood and experienced by all individuals as the universally intended result of their voluntary co-operation. The need to minimize the sphere of heteronomy is not, therefore, based on the assumption that Taylorization has become universal.11 Gorz repeatedly stresses the interpenetration of heteronomous and autonomous spheres, the need to improve working conditions and make work as fulfilling and democratic as possible. Just as the separation of spheres allows people to see their work not as spontaneous self-realization but as a clearly demarcated external necessity taking upin a society of disposable timea small portion of their lives, so they are also free to seek personal fulfilment in and through socialized labour. And nothing prevents them from attaching equal importance to their socially determined and their autonomous activities.12
8

Chris Whitbread, Gorz, Nove, Hodgson: The Economics of Socialism, Capital and Class, no. 26, Summer 1985, p. 139 his italics. 9 Gorz, Farewell to the Working Class, trans. Michael Sonenscher, London 1982, p. 9. 10 Gorz, Paths to Paradise, trans. Malcolm Imrie, London 1985, p. 51. 11 Berger and Kostede, Review of Farewell, p. 231. 12 Gorz, Farewell, p. 98.
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Autonomy in Work Such passages show how Farewell to the Working Class has been misread. In Paths to Paradise, published three years later, Gorz restates his position:
Heteronomous work is the inevitable outcome of socialization of the productive process, itself made necessary by the quantity and diversity of knowledge and techniques which go into individual products... This does not mean that heteronomy necessarily implies oppression and domination, boredom and/or exploitation. But it does necessarily imply the absence of individual control over the kinds of skill required and the overall purpose of collective work, and thus a degree of alienation.13

In Critique of Economic Reason, Gorz warns that his conception of a dual society runs counter to the argument certain hasty readers have attributed to me, according to which there would be a clear-cut opposition between the two spheres.14 Once again, Gorz insists that heteronomous work may containwhere it is co-operative, self-organized and selfmanageddimensions of autonomy which make it more fulfilling and pleasing.15 The post-Fordist reskilling of work considerably reduces the degree of heteronomy which characterized the fragmented labour of Taylorism. However, it does not eliminate this heteronomy, it displaces it.16 In other words, while workers may establish a degree of autonomy and collective decision-making on the shop floor, the goals of the work group or productive unit remain functionally regulated by the wider imperatives of the economic system. The members of these groups enjoy an appreciable margin of autonomy and scope for initiative but this is still autonomy in work, not of work.17 The assumption that heteronomous work is unskilled work is thus unfounded. Richard Hyman is right that The dynamics of capitalist production relations... have always involved elaborate trajectories of skill, de-skilling, and at times re-skilling.18 But Boris Frankel is mistaken when he argues that Gorz exaggerates the degree of deskilling which has taken place, gives the strong impression that all struggles by workers to control their workplaces... are futile, and dismisses even the limited struggles of the working class today.19 For Gorz, the technical division of labour is based on functional specialization, something which is typically the consequence of increasing individual competence. A building labourer, for example, has a far greater range of abilities than an engineer specialising in pre-stressed concrete, or a microsurgeon.20 Gorz does not dismiss the struggles of the working class, he merely insists on a recognition of their limitations. In Farewell to the Working Class, he
Gorz, Paths, pp. 50-51. Andr Gorz, Critique of Economic Reason, trans. Gillian Handyside and Chris Turner, Verso, London 1989, p. 102. 15 Ibid., p. 169. 16 Ibid., p. 78, his italics. 17 Ibid., p. 79, his italics. 18 Richard Hyman, Andr Gorz and his Disappearing Proletariat, The Socialist Register, London 1983, p. 286. 19 Boris Frankel, The Post-Industrial Utopians, Cambridge 1987, pp. 21213. 20 Gorz, Paths, p. 52.
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recognized workers power to control and veto: the power to refuse certain conditions and types of work, to define acceptable norms and enforce respect for these norms upon the managerial hierarchy.21 A few years later, he stressed the importance of self-determined working conditions exempt from oppressive hierarchies and monotonous tasks, but warned that such a liberation of work relations is not the same as autonomy of work itself or workers self-determination (or self-management) of its overall purpose and content.22 Moreover, as already noted by Gorz when he cited Simone Weils statement that no one would accept being a slave for two hours a day,23 reducing socially necessary labour time and enhancing peoples genuine autonomy may be a more potent catalyst for working-class struggles for control over the workplace than an affirmation of the bare vestiges of autonomy present in many occupations:
Individuals will, then, be much more exacting about the nature, content, goals and organization of their work. They will no longer accept stupefying work or subjection to oppressive surveillance and hierarchical structures. Liberation from work will have produced liberation within work, without as much as transforming work (as Marx predicted) into free self-activity with goals of its own.24

What is really at stake in this discussion of a dual society? Two essential themes are apparent. The first is that the Marxist ambition to reconcile the personal motives and desires of every individual with the collective labour of production can have totalitarian implications. Unless society reverts to primitive, small-scale, self-sufficient communitiesand renounces the enormous productive capacity and the spaces for autonomy that complex, structurally differentiated industrial societies have createdthe reunification of self and society, individual and history, subjective intentions and collective result, is impossible. If this impossibility is not universally recognized, if the material exigencies of the social system are not formally codified and demarcated as a sphere of heteronomy, there may be no effective obstacle preventing a dominant group monopolizing the definition of history and repressing or expelling those who direct doubt or criticism towards the organization of the material system. When life and work, self and society, moral autonomy and professional responsibility, are declared objectively unified, individuals who claim to experience the rules they have to observe and the work they have to perform as an external imposition, and who criticize the organization of this system and its domination over other social and private activities, may be labelled as human aberrations and become vulnerable to persecution. Failure to identify with the collective, to renounce those feelings, practices and relationssuch as sexual lovewhich resist mediation by society, thus leads to physical or psychological ostracism. Denied the right to experience themselves as separated from their social roles, the victims
21 22 23

Gorz, Farewell, p. 49. Gorz, Paths, p. 52, his italics. Gorz, Farewell, p. 87. 24 Gorz, Critique, p. 93, his italics.
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may be censored or excluded, branded by the community as moral delinquents corrupted by an insanity that really describes their failure to coincide with their socially defined essence. Socialist Morality and Emancipation Frankel notably fails to grasp this argument when he objects to Gorzs belief that a functional organization cannot be good in itself, but only by virtue of the space for self-organization, autonomy, co-operation and voluntary exchange which that organization offers.25 This means, Frankel claims, that social forces have nothing to fight for, as the denial of good state institutions, or a good society, disarms the Left and relativizes all stateswhether fascist or democraticas not better than one another. In actual fact, he continues, Gorz advocates a socialist morality as the basis for a good society, even though he denies any connection between morality and politics.26 One thing Gorz certainly doesnt advocate is a socialist morality. For Gorz, socialist morality refers to the demand made of workers that they experience the organizational prerequisites of administrative and economic apparatuses as a moral imperative corresponding to their personal will and desire. To say that an organization such as the state cannot be regarded as essentially good, merely restates Gorzs argument that functional power and the systemic requirements that constitute the sphere of heteronomy cannot be evaluated except by reference to peoples need for self-determination, for full control over the modes and outcomes of their social co-operation, which can be fulfilled outside that heteronomous sphere. In reality, emancipatory movements fight for emancipation, for the opportunity to produce themselves individually and collectively, assuming responsibility for the content and consequences of their projects. They do not fight for a statein both its literal and political sensenor a system whose functioning is, because of its internal complexity, beyond its members lived understanding and intentions. A society which defines a system or institution as intrinsically good by virtue of its own internal functioning loses the capacity to resist the extension of its parameters to aspects of private and social experience to which it is existentially inapplicable. In Gorzs view, this is exactly what is taking place, as technical, administrative and commercial apparatuses expand in order to recolonize the growing swathes of time that the economic sphere has left vacant, for want of being able to make it produce surplus-value. Our inability to resist this process of colonization by gauging the value of activities and relationships which have neither economic worth nor societal utility is itself symptomatic of the production of a world without sensory values and a hardened sensibility, which hardens thought in its turn.27 The second major implication of the heteronomyautonomy distinction

25 Gorz, 27 Gorz,

26 Frankel,

Farewell, p. 118. The Post-Industrial Utopians, p. 206. Critique, p. 87.

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is that if it is impossible to unify the content, motive and understanding of a job with its final objectives, then it is fruitless to expect workers to challenge the ultimate goals and consequences of their work at the workplace. Or, to put it another way, because of the separation of functional tasks and societal goals, it is a mistake to assume that humanizing the experience of work will humanize its objectives and its results. On the contrary: The possibilities for achieving excellent work relations and a congenial atmosphere are just the same whether one is producing chemical weapons or medicines, Action Man or educational games, pornography or art books.28
The intrinsic interest of a job does not guarantee its being meaningful, just as its humanization does not guarantee the humanization of the ultimate objectives it serves. Humanizing a job can make even the most barbaric of enterprises attractive for the people who work in them. Work can develop individual abilities, including the capacity for autonomous action, but the individuals professional autonomy does not necessarily lead to their moral autonomy, that is, their insistence that they will not work towards goals that have not been publicly debated and that they have not been able to examine and assume personally.29

A New Revolutionary Subject? While Gorzs critics reproach him for asserting a creative autonomy for the abstraction capital,30 Gorzs putative materialism is found to coexist with an idealist, anarchist, or existentialist belief in the autonomy of the individual, an idealism that allegedly leads Gorz to replace Marxs revolutionary proletariat with a new historical subject, the neo-proletariat. Thus Hyman argues that Gorz oscillates between a highly determinist model of the juggernaut of capital, and (no doubt reflecting his existentialist background) a tendency to voluntarism and idealism.31 Dick Howard agrees: His diagnosis of the end of capitalisms liberating potential leaves only existential ontological freedom as the foundation of a future politics. He continues: Although Gorz rejected the HegelianMarxist proletariat as the agent and subject of history, his non-class non-proletariat is nonetheless its functional replacement.32 Adrian Atkinson also attests that Gorzs dual society is an incarnation of his philosophical heritage, a restatement of liberal individualism rather than any development of Marxism. Gorzs concept of an irreducible dualism...is not Marxist at all but is a very clear reinterpretation of the French philosophical tradition from Descartes to Sartre: that life involves a struggle between an irreducible human essence and the dead machinery of the world around us.33 Making the ludicrous claim that in the 1950s Gorz was a supporter of the French Communist Party, which maintained that the apparatus and machinery of the Party hierarchy functioned in the interests of the people, Hodgson claims that Gorz has merely inverted his earlier views, now regarding the machine as
28 29 30

Gorz, Paths, p. 52. Gorz, Critique, p. 83, his italics. Byrne, A Rejection of Andr Gorzs Farewell, p. 78. 31 Hyman, Andr Gorz and his Disappearing Proletariat, p. 292. 32 Dick Howard, The Marxian Legacy, second edition, London 1988, pp. 389, 390. 33 Adrian Atkinson, Principles of Political Ecology, London 1991, p. 33.
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not in the interests of the people: There is thus a link between Gorzs quasi-Stalinist position of the 1950s and his quasi-anarchist position today. In both cases the conflicts, contradictions, and necessary elements of autonomy within capitalist industry are belittled. The system is a monolith.34 While I have already demonstrated that the monolithic character of heteronomy is a misrepresentation of Gorz, these arguments have more searching implications. If Arthur Hirsh is correct that in returning to his subjectivity Gorz has returned to the vintage existentialism of the early Sartre and his own youth,35 does this warrant the claim that Gorz has found a new revolutionary subject to replace the Marxist-Hegelian subject? It is true that the chapter in Farewell to the Working Class, The Non-Class of Post-Industrial Proletarians, was written in a rather cavalier style that invited criticism. Thus Gorzs claim that the non-class is free subjectivity leads Hyman to condemn as sheer mysticism the insinuation that socialism will be established through spiritual conversion alone,36 while Birchall ridicules Gorzs failure to consider the determination of the existing ruling class to preserve their privileges.37 There may be a case for the argument that Gorz misrepresents Marx in order to construct a straw man he can easily demolish,38 but the Marxist retort is weakened by its tendency to engage in intemperate criticisms of Gorzs irreverence for academic convention and of his willingness to take policies, ideas and observations from politically diverse commentators. It is also overshadowed by the tendency to reduce his thesis to one of deindustrialization, in which the proletariat is in the process of being abolished by technological change.39 This is refuted with empirical evidence indicating the growth of the industrial proletariat in global terms. From this perspective, Gorz is depicted as an enemy of the working class who believes that workers have neither the strategic power, nor the political sensibility, nor perhaps even the material need, to triumph over capitalism.40 Workers Resentment In this context, Gorzs position can be clarified as an objective and a subjective thesis. The objective thesis acknowledges that the working class harbours a negative capacity to disrupt capitalist growthwhat Gorz terms, following Sartres use of it in the first volume of his work on Flaubert, ressentiment. This involves pre-empting ones objectification by self-objectification, which for workers means strategically withdrawing the initiative, intelligence and goodwill which capitalism degrades
Hodgson, The Democratic Economy, pp. 1901. Arthur Hirsh, The French New Left, Montreal 1982, p. 242. 36 Hyman, Andr Gorz and his Disappearing Proletariat, p. 292. 37 Ian Birchall, Review of Farewell to the Working Class, Socialist Review, no. 50, January 1983, pp. 245. 38 Hyman, Andr Gorz and his Disappearing Proletariat; Birchall, Review of Farewell; Alex Callinicos, Making History, Cambridge 1987, p. 185. 39 Callinicos, Making History, p. 187. 40 Paul Kellogg, Goodbye to the Working Class?, International Socialism, no. 36, Autumn 1987.
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but cannot dispense with. This behaviour of resentment, says Gorz, which, by overacting the role the worker is expected to play, robs the oppressors of the desired results of their orders, is the last refuge of working-class dignity. It is in this sense that The power of the proletariat is the symmetrical inverse of the power of capital.41 But this thesis denies that the working class has the positive capacity to eliminate the heteronomy of the functional system and render direct and transparent each individuals relation to the totality of social production. The subjective thesis refers to the effect of functionally complex, differentiated societies on the perceptions and expectations of the individual. While macro-social work offers scarce opportunity for people to experience their labour as free self-activity, by which they create their world and recognize themselves in it, the differentiation of separate dimensions of existence, by expanding peoples repertoire of social roles and identities, introduces a fissure between the self and its social being, thereby releasing a degree of existential autonomy peculiar to modernity. In the preface to Farewell to the Working Class, Gorz observes that a real or potential majority of those in formal employment no longer identify themselves with their work, define themselves by their careers, nor seek and find in their jobs the centre of their lives and their primary source of fulfilment. In its general sense work, for them, has become an external duty or imposition. In its specific sense, work is a job which one has or is looking forrather than something one does. The stable linear life pattern oriented around a career vocation has been dislocated by a variety of changes, including the fact that productivity growth in Western Europe has enabled lifetime working hours to be halved in the space of a century. Gorz focuses primarily on the impact of new technologies on work and the consequences for employees in terms of increasing insecurity of tenure, depersonalization of work, and under-employment of skillsfor those in or out of work. The increasingly discontinuous and secondary character of the wage relation means that fewer and fewer people can define themselves by reference to their position in an economically determined productive community. Gorz also observes parallel cultural changes which are making the dissociation of people from their work roles more socially acceptable. The Non-Class of Non-Workers Gorz uses the term a non-class of non-workers to designate a stratum of people who experience work in this way. This wasnt an identifiable and organizable stratum, he later recalls, but the emergence of a thoroughgoing cultural change, which has continued to gain ground ever since.42 Insofar as they constitute a movement pressing for the abolition of work-based society, they are not, as Frankel assumes, a new revolutionary agent of change,43 an equally idealist replacement for Marxs working class. Gorz emphatically states that the non-class is not a social subject. It has no transcendent mission, no unity beyond the
41 42 43

Gorz, Farewell, pp. 39, 37. Gorz, Capitalism, Socialism, Ecology, trans. Chris Turner, Verso, London, 1994, p. 88. Frankel, The Post-Industrial Utopians, p. 212.

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experiences of those who compose it, no prophetic aura, no promise or capacity to reconcile the individual with the social, self and society. It is the possible social subject of the struggle for work-sharing, generalized reduction of work time, gradual abolition of waged work.44 It corresponds to a cultural mutation implying a radical subversion of capitalist ideology and values which will only eliminate capitalism if its latent content is revealed in the form of an alternative to capitalism that is able to capture the developing cultural mutation and give it political extension.45 The movement claims a right of autonomy that can only be affirmed by demonstrations of that autonomy itself. It must prefigure the institutional changes which it demands, otherwise its freedom will be negated by its structural articulation. No new liberties can be granted from above, by institutionalized power, unless they have already been taken and put into practice by people themselves. This fact, however, does not make it possible to dispense with the problem of defining the workings, juridical bases and institutional balance of power. It simply means that socialist society cannot be produced without, or in opposition to, this non-class, but only by it or with its support.46 It is true, then, that in Farewell to the Working Class the problem of political vectors47 is poorly addressed, that Gorz makes no clear provision for political mediation,48 and that there is no getting around organizational and institutional links.49 Gorz acknowledges the necessity of a political force but writes that he has deliberately left this question open and unresolved.50 This omission does not warrant the allegation that Gorz has a dismissive attitude towards economic and political democracy.51 Nor is it true that Gorz rejects collective action and fulfilment, returning to a classical liberalism in which it is in the sphere of individual autonomy that human beings will find themselves.52 Gorz insists that a political force is necessary to transform the nascent individual autonomy of the non-class into a collective movement and to safeguard that autonomy with compatible institutions and technologies: The process of transforming society in accordance with the aims of the movement will certainly never be an automatic effect of the expansion of the movement itself. It requires a degree of consciousness, action and will. In other words, it requires politics.53
As repeatedly pointed out in later writings, the non-class of non-workers could never be a social force or a new revolutionary agent. It is a loose collection of free-floating individuals who have no social identity, are unable to

Gorz, Paths, p. 35, his italics. Gorz, Farewell, p. 81. 46 Ibid., pp. 11, 12, 7. 47 Perry Anderson, In the Tracks of Historical Materialism, Verso, London 1983, p. 105. 48 Frankel, The Post-Industrial Utopians, p. 232. 49 Berger and Kostede, Review of Farewell, p. 233. 50 Gorz, Farewell, p. 13. 51 Anthony Giddens, The Perils of Punditry: Gorz and the End of the Working Class, in Giddens, Social Theory and Modern Sociology, Cambridge 1987, p. 295. 52 Byrne, A Rejection of Andr Gorzs Farewell, p. 79. 53 Gorz, Farewell, p. 12.
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acquire one, are socially doomed to self-determination and self-production of their selves, a condition of potential existential autonomy from which, obviously, they may also be tempted to escape regressively into fascist, racist, totalitarian, identitarian fanaticism if no cultural means to cope with and achieve their autonomy are available to them.54

Contrary to the view that Gorz believed the neo-proletariat to constitute the only agent of revolutionary change,55 he insists that the striving for emancipation cannot assert itself without trade-union struggles for a reshaping of work. Society wont be changed without a trade-union movement worthy of the name movement, he continues, but the creative impulses most often come from elsewhere.56 The Need to Work In the first of three papers that criticize Gorzs work, Sean Sayers attacks the utilitarian hedonism that underlies classical economics, which depicts work as a painful disutility tolerated as a means to satisfy deferred needs. As a dialectical materialist Sayers wants to demonstrate the contrary: that the need for work is a historically shaped, distinctly modern phenomenon that has potentially emancipatory implications. Specifically engendered by the capitalist mode of production, the subjective need to engage in sociable, active and productive labour is not yet matched, Sayers argues, by the objective framework of economic and social relations, and the objective organization of work, which would allow this need to be satisfied.57 Although Sayers concedes that Gorzs proposal for the liberation of time does not recommend a life of idle consumption, he makes the now familiar criticism that Gorz believes that fulfilment is possible only outside the sphere of employment, which is unavoidably alienating. On the contrary, Sayers argues, it is a mistake to regard all forms of employment in a purely negative light, for not only is work a more complex and ambivalent experience offering genuine and important satisfactions for the majority, but life without work is a profoundly demoralizing and unfulfilling one.58 Gorz does not disagree with this, and it is quite wrong to portray Gorz as proposing that work be an optional activity, and that those who elect not to work should be granted the financial means to live on the margins of the macro-social sphere. Sayers mistakenly asserts that in Paths to Paradise Gorz toyed with the idea of a guaranteed minimum income,59 an error that is shared by Frankel, Schecter, Keane and Owens, and Roche.60
letter, August 1993. The Post-Industrial Utopians, p. 211. The view that Gorz rejects any modern role for the labour movement is shared by Robyn Eckersley, Environmentalism and Political Theory, New York 1992, p. 124. 56 Gorz, Capitalism, Socialism, Ecology, pp. 69, 87. 57 Sean Sayers, The Need to Work, in R.E. Pahl, ed., On Work, Oxford 1988, p. 741, his italics. 58 Ibid., pp. 730, 731. 59 Sayers, Gorz on Work and Liberation, p. 16. 60 Frankel, The Post-Industrial Utopians, p. 84; Darrow Schecter, Radical Theories: Paths Beyond Marxism and Social Democracy, Manchester 1994, p. 161; John Keane and John Owens, After Full Employment, London 1986, pp. 1757; Maurice Roche, Rethinking Citizenship, Cambridge 1992, p. 177.
55 Frankel, 54 Private

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This is a mistake because Gorz has always been a critic of the guaranteed minimum income, if we take this to mean a basic universal income primarily designed to support people who are temporarily out of work, or who choose not to work at all. Gorz has always argued that the right to a guaranteed income must entail the right of each citizen to receive distributed throughout their lifethe product of the minimum amount of socially necessary labour which s/he has to provide in a lifetime.61 Unless this right (and obligation) is extended to every active citizen, the alternativea basic allowance granted to non-workerswill serve only to sanitize the dualization of society by making unemployment, disadvantage and marginalization socially acceptable. For non-workers, such an allowance is allocated as compensation for social and economic exclusion. Because it is given without asking anything of its recipients, it confers on them no rights over the society that maintains them. This is, Gorz acknowledges, the unenviable condition of the unemployed. Sayers is therefore wrong to state, in a second paper, that, By Gorzs standards, unemployment, as a total liberation from work, should constitute the complete realization of leisure, autonomy and freedom.62 Nor does Gorz, as Sayers alleges, celebrate the demise of the Protestant work ethic as proof that people are at last coming to appreciate that the need for work is a false and unnatural compulsion produced by modern society.63 Gorz believes, in fact, that the demand for abstract work will grow apace with the reduction of obligatory work time, as socially determined work becomes attractive for the same reasons that captive housewives, the unemployed and retired people desire it:
It provides an escape from the narrowness and stifling conformity of the domestic unit or village community, a way of meeting other people from other places with whom relationships can be freer, less familiar, than with those who see you first and foremost as daughter or daughter-in-law, sister or cousin, and tie you to a carefully regulated world where everyone must keep to their allotted place. It allows you to feel useful to society in a general sense, rather than in a particular way subject to particular relationships, and thus to exist as a fully social individual protected from the pressures of particular groups by anonymous membership of society at large.64

It is also untrue that Gorz argues that the need to work is a false and artificial creation of modern industrial society.65 On the contrary, Gorz believes that it is indisputable that work in the sense of poiesis is a historical-fundamental need: the need the individual feels to appropriate the surrounding world, to impress his or her stamp upon it and, by the objective transformations he or she effects upon it, to acquire a sense of him- or herself as an autonomous subject possessing practical freedom.66 Gorzs point is that this ideal of work is less and less applicable to the increasingly dematerialized, functionally specialized tasks performed in todays macro-social space. Where individuals are still capable of such
Paths, p. 41, my italics. Sayers, Work, Leisure and Human Needs, in Tom Winnifrith and Cyril Barrett, eds, The Philosophy of Leisure, London 1989, p. 49. 63 Sayers, The Need to Work, p. 738. 64 Gorz, Paths, p. 54. 65 Sayers, The Need to Work, p. 736. 66 Gorz, Capitalism, Socialism, Ecology, p. 55.
62 Sean 61 Gorz,

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sensuous-practical activity by which they impress themselves on the material world and recognize the mark they have made, Gorz argues that they have acquired and exercise this capacity largely outside the sphere of gainful employment. It is at this point that Sayers and Gorz really differ. Sayers is committed to the Marxist project of reconciling the productive system with the lived meanings and intentions of creative workers. In his view this would be possible in a rationally and humanely organized society which has transcended the stultifying confines of the capitalist system and brought about not the liberation of people from work . . . but rather the liberation of work.67 As Gorz has repeatedly argued, socialism cannot hope to eliminate the inertia and rigidities of the system and its apparatuseswhat Sartre called the practico-inertno more than a socialist army can dispense with hierarchies and a division of labour. The separation of the fruits of human labour from the intuitive understanding and personal intentions of workers could only be reversed by a return to the kind of pre-modern, self-sufficient communities that both Gorz and Sayers regard as regressive. This is why Gorz believes genuinely autonomous activity requires freedom from work, together with the humanization of the labour process to the greatest possible extent. Misreading Critique A third paper by Sayers is a critical response to Gorzs Critique of Economic Reason. Again Sayers insists on introducing Gorz as a critic of the idea that work is a basic human need and right. He also claims that Gorz has undergone a dramatic change since his earlier books, noting three areas of change, each of them inaccurate. First, he attests that while in Gorzs earlier work employment was portrayed as an entirely negative phenomena and that people should welcome unemployment as a liberation from work, in Critique of Economic Reason Gorz recognizes that people do not welcome unemployment. Second, as already noted, Sayers claims that in Paths to Paradise, Gorz courted the idea of a guaranteed basic income (Sayers himself puts these words in inverted commas, despite the fact that Gorz has never used them to describe his own proposal), while in Critique of Economic Reason Gorz comes out in favour of the right to work and in opposition to the provision of income as compensation for unemployment. Third, Sayers claims that Gorz previously believed that the non-class of non-workers were to be the new revolutionary subjects of the post-industrial age. But now Gorz has given up his hope that these groups will accomplish the revolution he wants to see. His appeal is now directed mainly to the goodwill of the labour movement.68 I have already demonstrated that all three depictions of Gorzs earlier position are misreadings. For the sake of clarity, Sayerss critique of Gorz will now be considered in terms of the three topics he introduces: domestic labour, the caring professions, and economically rational work. On the subject of domestic labour, Sayers finds Gorzs desire to limit the rationalization of housework surely untenable. Sayers makes three
67 Sayers, 68 Sayers,

The Need to Work, p. 740. Gorz on Work and Liberation, pp. 1617.

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points. First, he argues that Gorzs view that work-for-oneselfwork which serves exclusively the maintenance of my own self and those with whom I form a life-community69is fundamental to peoples existential well-being, does not match up with the majority of housewives who find housework a burdensome chore. Second, he argues that Gorz offers no criteria for deciding whereif anywhere, the economic rationalization of housework is appropriate, and where it is not, and he ignores the possibilities for further socializing and mechanizing domestic labour.70 Third, since for most people a great deal of housework is inescapable, Sayers argues, opposing any reduction of its burdensome aspects on the basis that housework is, or ought to be, a labour of love, is reactionary and misguided.71 The Servant Class While Gorz has never proposed that housework be a labour of love, it is true that Gorz regards domestic labourwhich is virtually all that is left of work-for-oneself since industrial capitalism transferred production for oneself to the public sphereas both exacting and fulfilling. Reducing it entirely to one aspect or the other is impossible, he believes, but minimizing the oppressive aspect of housework is possible if the time available to do it in is increased, and if responsibility for domestic chores is equitably shared between the inhabitants of the household:
[Work-for-oneself] is ambivalent, being at once burdensome and gratifying, or each of these in turn, depending on the circumstances. Not doing such work means entrusting it to servants. It is mainly made of all the various activities of self-maintenance. Such work will be less burdensome and more gratifying as free time is more abundant.72

Sayers argument that Gorz fails to provide a criterion to show where the economic rationalization of housework is inapplicable is disingenuous, not least because Sayers acknowledges in a footnote that Gorz does offer a criterion, but one that he summarily dismisses as seriously flawed. Gorz opposes the so-called rationalization of domestic labour because he regards it as intimately connected with the dualization or SouthAfricanization of society. This is the process by which a division is emerging between well-paid, full-time workers in stable conditions of employment in the highly capital-intensive sector which produces the greatest part of the economic surplus, and low-paid, part-time, precariously employed workers in the labour-intensive service sector, who are increasingly employed by the former to save them time and relieve them of burdensome chores. The economic precondition for the growth of this servant class, Gorz points out, is the falling relative price of commodities due to automation. This has increased the disposable income of the wealthy at the same time as it has increased the number of those expelled from the automated production process, many of whom can only find replacement work by
69 70

Gorz, Capitalism, Socialism, Ecology, p. 61. Sayers, Gorz on Work and Liberation, pp. 18, 19. 71 Ibid., p. 18. 72 Gorz, Capitalism, Socialism, Ecology, p. 97.
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serving the personal needs of those who have benefited from their redundancy. This divided society has also been promoted by income-tax cuts in favour of the rich, which has taken purchasing power away from those poorest sections of society who are likely to spend it on the products of automated industries, and increased the income of the wealthy minority who are more likely to spend their wealth on luxuries and personal services that are labour-intensive and so create jobs. Gorz defines the new servants as those who provide socialized services with no more efficiency or quality than consumers could perform or provide them for themselves. This is not productive substitution, as in the heroic age of industrialism when household production was replaced by socialized production, but equivalent substitution whose chief purpose is to redistribute wealth without calling into question the work ethic, the wage relation and competition for jobs. The employment of these service workers:
take[s] no less time (if we take into account the working hours accumulated in the installations and equipment involved) than we ourselves would if we were to do the things they do for us. The time they gain for us is not productive time, but time for consumption and comfort. They are not working to serve collective interests, but to serve us as individuals, and to give us private pleasure. Their work is our pleasure. Our pleasure gives them work which we consume directly.73

Gorz accepts that there may be an indirect economic rationality for such workwhat economists call comparative advantageif the time saved by these servants is used by the purchaser to perform labour that is more socially useful or economically productive than the activities the servants would be capable of doing. But this is never entirely the case, because workers who are obliged to spend their time doing other peoples chores on top of their own are already prevented from acquiring the skills necessary to contribute to society in a socially recognized, productive way. Their subordinate position serves as a pretext for attributing their poor status to inherent inferiority, while the legal contract or public identity conferred on workers who are fortunate to be employed by service enterprises serves to conceal, Gorz argues, a relationship of servility whose essential characteristic is the giving of oneself. The first precondition for the true economic rationalization of work-foroneself is, therefore, that the quantity of paid labour provided is much lower than the quantity of domestic labour saved.74 The alternative is that the members of the professional elite:
will purchase services and appliances which will allow them to save time even when producing these services and appliances takes more time than the average person will save by using them. They will thus foster the development, across the whole of society, of activities which have no economic rationalitysince the people performing them have to spend more time in doing them than the people benefiting from them actually saveand which only serve the private interests of the members of this professional elite, who are able to purchase time more cheaply than they can sell it personally.75
73 74

Gorz, Critique, p. 155. Ibid., p. 4. 75 Ibid., p. 5, his italics.

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Here then is one criterion for deciding whether the economic rationalization of domestic labour is appropriate or not: the rationalization of housework is inapplicable when it is not economically rational at all. The Threat to Personal Life Having established the distinction between heteronomous and autonomous spheres, in Critique of Economic Reason Gorz defined the autonomous sphere as the realm of non-commodity activities. This was further refined and broken down into autonomous activitiesactivities which are neither necessary nor useful and which constitute an end in themselvesand work-for-oneselfthe production of that use-value of which we are ourselves both the originators and the sole beneficiaries.76 Gorz pointed out that because much heteronomous labour is not necessary insofar as it produces destructive, obsolescent or anti-economic goods and services, and because much necessary labour (work-for-oneself) is not heteronomous insofar as it corresponds to felt needs and experiences, then it is no longer so much the freedom/necessity distinction which is decisive, but the autonomy/heteronomy opposition.77 In contrast to activity which is autonomous or immediately useful to the person performing it, heteronomous work is experienced as something quite distinct from the intentional, sensuous-practical activity envisaged by Marxist humanism. Gorz cites a definition by Claus Offe and Rolf Heinze, which states that the concept work cannot be applied to activities which have greater utility for the person performing them than for society at large. Instead, work presupposes the social . . .nature of the goals of an activity. . . and the possibility of its critical evaluation from the point of view of efficiency and productivity.78 The threat posed by the encroachment of heteronomy into activities which are not guided by this criterion of social utility is, therefore, the threat of destroying the lived meaning of a private and micro-social space in which individuals exist for one another as unique persons who do not have to subordinate their lives and their aims to the goals of society, though they may certainly, of their own free will, choose to co-operate on a personal basis in the achievement of social goals.79 Further rationalisation of the lifeworld begs the question:
By dint of monetizing, professionalizing and transforming into jobs the few remaining production and service activities we still perform for ourselves, might we not reduce our capacity to look after ourselves almost to the point where it disappears, thus undermining the foundations of existential autonomy, not to mention the foundations of lived sociality and the fabric of human relationships?80

Gorzs point is that if the attempt to include in the definition of work the labour of self-maintenance and reproduction is not resisted, if we fail, in other words, to appreciate the lived meaning that household activities
Ibid., p. 153. Ibid., p. 166. Frankel fails to grasp this distinction and, assuming that all burdensome work is heteronomous, wonders why domestic tasks should not be paid for like other forms of heteronomous labour. The Post-Industrial Utopians, p. 91. 78 Cited by Gorz, Capitalism, Socialism, Ecology, p. 61. 79 Ibid. 80 Ibid., pp. 512.
77 76

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have for the people who perform them, then there is no reason why the right to parenthood, to take care of ones body and ones living environment, to look after oneself, ones relations and neighbours, cannot and should not be given over to the sanction and control of external authorities. Responding to this threat, Gorz is most compelling in his opposition to the socialization of the maternal function.
In this formulation, the intensely affective and relational bodily activity by which the mother gives a life and cherishes ita life which takes the incomparably unique form of her childis reduced to womens participation in the social process of production of life in general, life as a socially useful product . . . This conception plays right into the hands of the technocratic-authoritarian spirit of domination, since if the production of life and of subjects capable of taking their place in the system of social labour is the truly productive form of work from a social point of view, there will be no valid reason not to socialize that work: that is to say, no reason not to remove it from the personal control of each mother and transfer it to socially dependable, functional and efficient apparatuses. This is precisely what is recommended by advocates of ectogenesis (i.e. growing the foetus outside the mothers body right up to total maturation), on the pretext of releasing women from the servitude of motherhood.81

On the second subject, that of the caring professions, Sayers repeats his view that it is simply not possible to draw a sharp line between activities which can and cannot be economically rationalized.82 This is his response to Gorzs view that a reduction in working hours would allow the repatriation to voluntary communities of many social services currently administered by professionals. Public and Private Welfare Systems Gorzs attempt to sketch a grassroots alternative to care that is either commercialized by the market or standardized by the codifying logic of a dependency-promoting state, is unfavourably received by Sayers who interprets it as a positively dangerous ally to the Rights critique of the welfare state. Sayers makes two mistakes here. First, he wrongly interprets Gorzs proposals for services organized on a voluntary basis as merely an extension of what he rightly notes is the haphazard and variable standard of informal care by the family. The professionalization of such services, Sayers argues, would ensure that care was guaranteed on a universal basis and minimum standards specified and enforced. Here Sayers appears to assume that voluntary organizations are incapable of guaranteeing reliable service provision based on collectively-defined standards and user-defined needs, of enforcing members adherence to democratically determined rules and regulations, and of assessing the needs of users without recourse to external consultants and professionals. Sayers second mistake is to assume that Gorz proposes that the state and market be rolled back and people be left to fend for themselves. Not only does Gorz emphasize that, It is not a question of dismantling the welfare state but of relieving it,83 but he even goes as far as to propose a synergy
81 82 83

Ibid., pp. 623, his italics. Sayers, Gorz on Work and Liberation, p. 18. Gorz, Critique, p. 237.

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within a two-tiered system supported on the one hand by centralized services provided by institutions, and on the other by self-organized, cooperative services staffed by volunteers.84
Each tenant may choose either to use the self-organized services or the more anonymous ones provided by the local authority. The former are not designed to compensate for the shortcomings of the latter, but to shape them and orient them in a decentralized manner, towards needs defined by residents themselves.85

Sayers final subject is Gorzs category of economically rational work. This he inaccurately defines as the absolute, polar opposite of caring workit excludes any element of personal concern or involvement; it is merely a means to the end of earning a livelihood. Reminding us that people need satisfaction and involvement from work, and can usually find it in the most unfavourable of jobs, Sayers repeats his caricature of heteronomy and objects that It is simply wrong to believe that work for wages must necessarily be nothing but an alien and purely instrumental activity.86 Sayers concludes that Gorzs gross romanticization of personal and community relations and his attempt to defend the sovereignty of the domestic sphere is a version of liberal individualism which is conservative and even backward looking, for its aim is to limit or reverse economic development. Gorzs position, he continues, is a despairing philosophy, for if we give up hope of a satisfactory social sphere, we cut ourselves off from an essential and vitally necessary sphere of activity and potential fulfilment.87 We have already noted Gorzs opinion that heteronomy does not mean that the workplace has to be hell or purgatory, and also his belief that the heteronomous, macro-social sphere will raise individuals above the narrow space of the local community, offer constantly renewed possibilities for discovery, insight, experiment and communication [which] can prevent communal life becoming impoverished and eventually suffocating, and thus provide the space for circulation on which communal life can feed.88 Despite these explicit words from Farewell to the Working Class, Sayers insists on reading Gorz as a traditionalist, contrasting his idea of socialism with that of his own progressive philosophy, which criticizes the backward-looking romanticism of writers like Gorz.89 This view is shared by David Byrne, who believes Gorz has no admiration for industrial capitalism, that he advocates a not a progressive but a conservative utopia, implying a reversion to artisan and petty commodity production.90 Capitalism Tamed by the Lifeworld To put the record straight, Gorz is a theorist of modernity.91 More than
84 Ibid.,

p. 146, his italics. p. 159. 86 Sayers, Gorz on Work and Liberation, p. 19, his italics. 87 Ibid. 88 Gorz, Farewell, pp. 1023. 89 Sayers, Gorz on Work and Liberation, p. 19. 90 Byrne, A Rejection of Andr Gorzs Farewell, pp. 87, 89. 91 See Gorzs critique of Illichs traditionalism in Critique, pp. 1624.
85 Ibid.,

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any proponent of dialectical materialism, Gorz wishes to safeguard the dynamism of a society which has, by virtue of its internal differentiation, evolved into relatively autonomous spheres of action and validity. It is precisely the clear and demarcated separation of heteronomous and autonomous spheres which preserves societys reflexivity, its capacity to act upon itself, its potential for progress. Gorz is not a utopian traditionalist: I consider utopian, in the bad sense of the term, ideal objectives that dont indicate new possibilities for emancipatory action.92 In other words, re-establishing the unity of differentiated spheres by subordinating them to the rationality of one of them will have an inevitably totalitarian character: it will block the societys capacity to evolve.93 Gorzs definition of socialism, therefore, does not aim to abolish the economic and administrative systems, but only to limit and bind them into the lifeworld.94 This requires, in other words, that economic rationality is preserved along with the relative autonomy of the economic sphere. Socialism does not mean the development of a socialist economy. There is no other science of managementno other micro-economic rationalitythan the capitalist one.95 In Gorzs eyes, the logic of capital must be retained; what is transcended is capitalism as a social totality in which relations conducive to the valorization of capital predominate in the hierarchy of values, in everyday life and in politics.96 The socialist project must be to lock the maximization of productivity and profit into a democratically defined framework plan so as to subordinate capitalist rationality, as Karl Polanyi argued, to societys non-quantifiable values and goals. Whilst capitalism is defined by Gorz as the domination of society by economic rationality, the process by which the apparatuses of production have acquired autonomy from felt needs is also, he believes, a precondition for society to exercise democratic control over the economys social and ecological orientation. Conclusion If Gorz has been gravely misinterpreted, the widespread neglect of his contribution to popular debates in the social sciences is equally serious. Arguments for economic democracy, for example, typically refuse to distinguish between professional and moral autonomy. Industrial democracy is instead portrayed as a morally desirable economic system constitutive of socialism.97 As we have seen, socialism conceived of as an alternative social and economic system tends to censor a more radical concept of autonomy based on our ability to bear moral responsibility for our acts and their consequences. Even if the putative growth of regional economies permits a reduction in the spatial division of labour entailed in the production of certain goods, when production and consumption are separatedas they must be in any complex modern society where local self-sufficiency is rejectedwe cannot describe the functional autonomy of workers empowered to determine the best means of
92 93

Gorz, Capitalism, Socialism, Ecology, p. 95. Ibid., p. 24. 94 Ibid., p. 41. 95 Ibid., p. 76. 96 Ibid., p. 69. 97 See Robin Archer, Economic Democracy: The Politics of Feasible Socialism, Oxford 1995.
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satisfying abstract market demand as moral autonomy. In a market economy, workers are no more able to pass moral judgement on consumers sovereign choices than consumers are able to choose their commodities knowing the concrete conditions under which they are produced. Ultimately, as we have seen, by failing to distinguish social labour from the autonomous activity by which we transform and appropriate our sensory world, we abandon all grounds for not giving over the most intimate of personal activities to the rational functioning of the democratic economy. Popular ideas about market socialism and proposals to delimit the sphere of the market have regularly omitted Gorzs valuable contribution to this debate.98 Fashionable discussion about post-Fordist forms of work organization and technology has also failed to answer Gorzs criticisms.99 Interrogating the utopia of work depicted by the likes of Kern, Schumann, Piore and Sabel, Gorz has explored the experience of modern labour from a phenomenological perspective, refuting the claim that flexible specialization augurs the reunification of occupational culture and the culture of everyday life. Technical autonomy, intellectual stimulation, variety and challenge is not enough to bridge the divorce between work and life.100 The question is whether work enriches or sacrifices our physical sensibilities, whether it extends the ground of our lived certaintiesthe three-dimensional lifeworld that we know through our bodies as unmistakably as our bodies ourselves or whether, by its materials and techniques, it does violence to our corporeal existence. In Gorzs account, the increasingly dematerialized nature of work, the displacement by computers and automated machinery of workers sensuous-practical relation to their personal tools, the materials they handle and the products they create, means that work can no longer be credibly equated with the free development of individuality. The danger Gorz observes in the glorification of work and the ideal of the sovereign, multi-skilled craftician is that, when the total volume of economically necessary work is steadily diminishing,101 the utopia of work can only be maintained at the cost of denying the privileges of the working elite to a growing mass of unemployed and marginalized workers, thereby destroying the bonds of solidarity that are a prerequisite for workers emancipation. At the very least, a reduction in working time would have the ideological impact of weakening the work ethic. More effectively, by redistributing working time it would abolish the competition for scarce jobs on which capitalist domination is based. It is precisely for this reason that employers are much more acquiescent to skilled workers demand for autonomy within heteronomy, as Gorz puts it, and the rehabilitation of the utopia of work. What is most striking is the reluctance of British commentators to consider Gorzs proposals for reducing working time and guaranteeing
98 99

See Gorz, Critique, pp. 13571. See Ash Amin, ed., Post-Fordism: A Reader, Oxford 1994. 100 Gorz, Critique, pp. 7389. 101 See Jeremy Rifkin, The End of Work, New York 1995.
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an income independent of the number of hours worked. In a recent collection of essays on the need for time,102 there was not a single reference to Gorz. Mulgan and Wilkinson, for example, favour micro solutions against macro policies which encroach on peoples freedom of choice. Instead of Gorzs proposal for ex ante decisions on the allocation of disposable time based on predicted productivity growtha decision to which the economy must adaptex post reasoning leaves many contributors worried that reduced working hours can only be financed by a reduction in income which will always be unattractive. Unwilling to advocate what Gorz calls a politics of timethe task of civilizing the time coming our wayRobert Lanes worthy demonstrations that money does not buy happiness lead him to conclude that, because research indicates that increased free time is only spent in passive consumption, greater wealth should be translated into humanized working conditions rather than greater consumption or free time. The importance of Gorzs ideas stretch wider than this, including an existential critique of the sociologistic conception of the lifeworld,103 a phenomenological interpretation of the political ecology movement,104 and a persuasive argument against wages for housework.105 It is frustrating to be misunderstood, but an insult to be ignored. A more faithful reading of Gorz will prove the relevance of his work to the problems of today.

Time Squeeze, Demos Quarterly, no. 5, 1995. Gorz, Critique, pp. 173180. This can be traced back to the neo-Sartrean text Gorz wrote in the 1950s, Fondements pour une morale, Paris 1977, especially the chapter on Natural Life, pp. 14197. 104 Gorz, Political Ecology: Expertocracy versus Self-Limitation, nlr 202, November December 1993, pp. 5567. 105 See Gorz, Critique, pp. 140, 1502, 1614. Michael Young and A. H. Halsey for the Institute for Policy Research recently proposed a parent wage to discourage full-time mothers from choosing single parenthood for financial reasons. Family and Community Socialism, London 1995.
103 See

102 The

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